After years of downloading , it is time for me to make a sort in my own maps and adventures and share some of them .

About maps I tried to have maps as accurate whith the real landscape at the real time the Editor allowed . I fear that lead to more or less similar maps , as ancient greeks were neither silly nor masochists ... Their usual criteria for a settlement were :* A large ( and if possible coastal ) plain .* At least a stream , not too big to avoid big floods , and coastal if possible ( setting a trireme a week in fresh water kills sea weeds and parasit shells on the skull , they were as lazy as we are now for scraping wood ... ).* At least a spring , not to depend upon stream water for drinking .*Some fertile soils , and they were scarce , most of the now cultivated soils are the result of thousand years of humain care and use of iron plows ! The only soils easy to cultivate whith primitiv wooden plows were alluvial light soils near the streams .* Wood , game and stone available .

The only settlements I found whithout all this criteria had special purposes , ore mining , trade whith natives , or strategical and/or logistical reasons , like a midway rest/shelter on long sea trade roads .

The tricks ( spoilers follow !!! )

Cliff feeding : A market seller feeds any house in a range of two tiles , even if the first tile near the road is a cliff or a water/rock tile . So you can feed houses on a plateau whith markets a floor under or above as long as a tile of the house is at two tiles of the market seller path .

Switched walkers :

Walkers in Zeus can be forced to a very long ( >500 tiles ) path by including their home building ( f.e. market ) in a loop , using a roadblock to send them in the proper direction and cut the direct road to home behind them before the homing path is computed . They now do the entire loop for homing ... Seems boring , in fact not too much , if :1 ) the loop is long enough , you care a market seller nearly twice a game year ...2 )The several forced walkers you need are nearly synchronized , you deal whith them and then forget them for several monthes .

Two steps immigration :

In some maps ( f.e. Laurion ) the proper housing spot is too far from entry point and the computer don't find a path for immigrants . You need to set a provisory compound halfway and delete it when peopled , if you care a little about the building table ( setting vacant spots out of reach but near the entry for the incoming migrants ) most of the hobboes now aim to the proper housing spots . Beware that setting anything on their new computed path leads to their vanishing in thin air ...

Marble teleport : When you set a temple , marble is picked in the nearest SY containing marble . If you undo , marble is set in the nearest SY accepting marble , overall if the previous storage is now set to refuse marble ...

More difficult when only one temple can be build , as you need to stockpile marble but not in a SY . Just build some SY , set one of them to accept marble , teleport as usual , set another SY disconnected to get marble and when oxcarts are homing , set the SY to refuse . 8 marble in beeing ... Use as many SY as needed , all whithout any road connection between them .

sansensei/at/outlook.fr

I am not too good for long stories and apologize for my poor english , as I am french and learned english 50 years ago ... Some grammar and spelling mistakes can remain , please be less harsh as my english teacher was ( a mistake on a sheet led to rewrite the entire sheet ... ) .